How Hitler almost starved Britain

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How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

“The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” – Winston Churchill

Dwarkesh Patel

Sep 05, 2025

Transcript

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies this framework to today, arguing that Russia and China are similarly constrained by their geography, making them vulnerable in any conflict with maritime powers (like the U.S. and its allies).

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – How WW1 shaped WW2

(00:15:10) – Hitler and Churchill’s battle to command the Atlantic

(00:30:10) – Peripheral theaters leading up to Normandy

(00:37:13) – The Eastern front

(00:48:04) – Russia’s & China’s geographic prisons

(01:00:28) – Hitler’s blunders & America’s industrial might

(01:15:03) – Bismarck’s limited wars vs Hitler’s total war

Transcript

00:00:00 – How WW1 shaped WW2

Sarah Paine 00:00:00

It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different. Basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves primarily at sea. That opens certain possibilities. Others can't. That opens and closes certain possibilities. I'm going to talk about this story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360° “you can't get me” moat. It's an instructive case for the United States, of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of position. So that is my game plan today.

You can look at the great peninsula of Europe where Britain is located. You can see this northern coastline for Britain, where it's uncomfortably close to the continent. Its enemies are sitting there and it's an interesting neighborhood. So here's my plan. I'm going to talk about these continental problems that Britain has been dealing with. If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France. In 1871, Germany unifies and then the problem's Germany.

I'm going to pick up the story in 1939 when things are really bad for Britain. I'm first going to talk about these continental problems, and then I'm going to talk about how Britain tried to deal with it. First it has to do with getting sea control, and then once you can do that, finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with the continental problem. You probably need allies.

So those are the first four topics. That was then and now is now. The continental problems now are China and Russia. We will see what this case study might reveal about the ongoing things.

So here's Britain uncomfortably close to the continent. If it wants to get to Russia, which is its big ally in World War I and World War II, it's either got to go way up north around the Norwegian coastline—you get up into places like Murmansk and Archangel—or it's got to go way around through this very narrow sea, the Mediterranean, through the choke point of choke points, which is the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, into the Black Sea. The main point port back in the day was Odessa.

If you compare French and British access to the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline that just gets it right into the oceans. Germany, if it wants to send merchant traffic or naval traffic, it's got to go through these narrow seas. Then it's got to get by Britain, which is its big enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant naval power. So that's complicated.

For Britain, if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, it wants to go through the Suez Canal. That requires the cooperation of Spain, France, Italy. If it wants to get to Russia, it requires Turkey as well. Well, Turkey didn't cooperate very well in either war. If you think about World War II—the Fall of France, fascist sympathies of Spain, Italy as part of the Axis—Britain is in real trouble. What do you do about this? Britain has this big empire that it wants to protect. It's got a massive basing system, more bases than anybody else does in order to protect this empire.

From this, which is a very resentful Germany. Doesn't much like the Versailles settlement of World War I. It's a divided country in that a Polish Corridor separates East Prussia. The Germans start trying to solve this problem. Initially they're taking Austria, the Sudeten German parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Then they take all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. They've already dealt with the Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized per the terms of the Versailles Treaty. They ignore that and remilitarize in 1936.

This is important because there are a lot of industrial resources and factories and things there. It turns out that Hitler's plans require—it's not optional— it requires the resources not only of the Rhineland, but also Czechoslovakia and Poland and Romania, which is going to have the oil for them.

You get to 1939, when Russia and Germany are dividing up Poland between them. This is the part of the history that Russians don't like to talk about, but it's exactly what they were doing. This triggers World War II because the French and the British honor their alliance with the Poles to help deal with this.

So in 1940, Britain's in a world of hurt. It faces this massive blue problem. Then there's this growing green disaster. It's facing two continental powers, Germany and Russia, that both have these expansive empires they want to create. They want to divide Europe and then the rest of the world. Bad news for Britain.

But 1941, Hitler decides he needs Russia too. Then Russia decides, “Ah, the one that's attacking me is probably the major problem, not the other one.” So Stalin is going to swap sides and he's going to be coordinating with Britain. That's better from Britain's point of view than having two continental powers to deal with. So now it's down to one.

Once the United States has gotten into the war, this is what the world looks like. You have a big cancer in Europe from the British point of view. But it's all surrounded by oceans that Britain can get to. A lot of allies are neutral states. So Britain has access to those places. Then there's a separate cancer in Asia where Japan's trying to work its magic. I say separate because the Axis never coordinated these two theaters.

So this is looking at the world from a maritime perspective. What you're looking at are all the oceanic routes that connect everything. Britain's problem is how to leverage the miracle of sea transport that basically can access you the whole world, versus a logistical nightmare of land transport where you can only drive through countries that will let you drive through. The seas give you mobility, they give you access to theaters, markets, resources, allies, and. They also give you sanctuary at home. If you're surrounded by them, it makes it harder for people to invade. So Britain's trying to leverage all of that against the armies of the continental armies. It's going to try to strangle them economically, diplomatically and militarily.

Now, the generation that led World War II in Britain—not just Britain but elsewhere—were the conscripts of World War I, which was supposed to end all wars. They knew full well, in the midst of World War II, that it did not remotely achieve that promise. They learned a whole series of lessons. I'm going to do a comparison of what was done in World War I versus World War II. They are the greatest generation, not their children who claim the title.

Lesson number one is don't go beyond the culminating point of attack. What's that? The terminology comes from Carl von Clausewitz, who is the Western guru on conventional land warfare. It means if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far you'll weaken yourself because the enemy will counterattack and send you further backwards than you would have otherwise been. In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into ongoing machine gun fire. What do you suppose is going to happen to them? This profligate waste of life in these assaults out of trenches… Maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that, nothing. These offensives would go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths.

No more doing that in World War II. You can look at the death figures for World War I and II. In World War I, the British army gets the multi-million man army that they had coveted. They deploy it on the main front from start to finish and chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II when they have a peripheral strategy.

In World War II, they do make the mistake of landing the big army on the continent as an opening move, but it doesn't do well. Then they reassess and get that army off the continent immediately. This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is. The French are covering the British as they're decamping from the continent, saving the British army. This is why France has such large casualties, even though France isn't in the war that long. It's going to be a long wait before the British get back on the continent. It’s also a long wait also for the United States to get in the war. There's no more going beyond the culminating point of attack.

The way diplomacy is run is also completely different. In World War I there were exactly two conferences trying to coordinate things among the Entente powers—the December 1915 and November 1916 Chantilly Conferences. All they are are the military heads. Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown in early 1917. It is too late. What happened in World War I is that the Germans focused on the Western Front in 1914, Eastern Front in 1915, back to the Western Front in 1916. In World War II the idea is you want to squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts so they can't divert people back and forth.

If you look at the coordination, it begins even before the United States is in the war with the ABC staff talks, then the Atlantic Conference which yields the Atlantic Charter, talking about what war objectives are: unconditional surrender of Germany and what the postwar situation is going to look like. There's coordination not only among military leaders, but among civil and military leaders as well. There's a combined command of US and British forces. We have offices in each other's capitals. We're also coordinating with the Russians so that you're setting up not only war termination but also what postwar institutions are going to be like to hold the peace. It's a completely different event from World War I when Russia falls out of the Entente because there are bread riots in St. Petersburg and Russia could not supply its troops with adequate armaments.

Well, that's not going to happen in World War II. Russia comes with a really large army. Germany has another large army. You've got to have a big army to deal with Germany's army. In World War I, there is no Lend-Lease aid. No one would have thought of giving that much stuff to each other. It's like everybody first and then it's like okay, everybody last in that one. .

The railways that had not been completed in World War I. The Trans-Siberian doesn't get completed until 1916, and the Murmansk railway isn't completed until early 1917. The Romanov dynasty is gone. It's too late. In World War II, three-quarters of Lend-Lease aid would go over those completed railway systems.

Now, to the British credit, they did try to break the blockade on Russia. The way to get into Russia in those days and hook in with the railway system would be to get into the Black Sea at Odessa. Russia had all the men, but they didn't have all the war materiel to fight. This is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in. You can argue about whether you think it’s good strategy or not, but it was miserably executed.

First of all, it wasn't a joint operation. What's joint? Joint means you're coordinating your different military services, in this case army and navy. What goes on? The British Navy tries to run the Dardanelles for two months. That does not work well. Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something was up? Yeah. When you get up there on the Dardanelles, it's a very steep place. The Ottomans are all busy sorting that all out, getting troops in place. Two months later, when the British, New Zealand, Australian and French troops all land on a given day, the Ottomans are there with a welcome party, essentially. That invasion stalemates in three days. But they keep at it for eight months, taking 190,000 casualties, 55,000 of whom are dead, totally miserably executed. It comes as collateral damage.

As the British are trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, this is when the Ottomans are terrified of their Christian subjects, the Armenians. They're starting to round them up, pulling them out of the army. Then days before the landing, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians begins. Between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians are killed. That's a lot of collateral damage.

The Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II. This is another contested landing of trying to get armies in. First of all, the buildup of war materiel goes on for years to get all the landing vessels, the equipment, the forces all ready to go in Britain. Then the disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely misinformed. They were expecting the landing to be at the Pas-de-Calais, which is the shortest place. It's way off in Normandy. That worked. Everybody lands on a day and they're up and over and into places inland.

Another lesson learned. The Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do. They would convoy troop transports, but they wouldn't deal with the Merchant Marine until 1918. Well, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff. The Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare. They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war.

Another difference between World War II and World War I. At the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad. They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of France. Nobody's in Germany. Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their government had done. Therefore Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they had inflicted on others in order to end it.

Even so, the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers. But they almost wreck themselves in the process. It's a Pyrrhic victory for France and Britain. It really weakens them. World War II is going to be a different event. That's the lesson from being in this continental situation, the lessons learned from the last time around

00:15:10 – Hitler and Churchill’s battle to command the Atlantic

Sarah Paine 00:15:10

Now for what the British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem. The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this is typically blockade. What you want to do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas. Because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas.

The British were well aware that Germany's a trading country. Most of its trade goes by sea and it's also on these narrow seas. Geographically and economically it's really vulnerable to blockade. Germany gets alternate resources, but they come at a much higher cost. They're much more difficult. You're really putting stress on the German economy and causing inflation and other things.

But if you blockade, a continental power can't blockade you back. Why? They're on the narrow seas, so they can't deploy a surface fleet. You'll sink it. Also they can't easily blockade a coastline that faces the open seas, the high seas. You can do other things on narrow seas, but it's pretty tough. What do you do if you cannot blockade ships in port?

Well, then what you're going to try to do is commerce raiding to try and sink things when they're out and about. That was what Germany did in World War II and why its occupation of France was so important. Once it took the French coastline, it then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. They're going to be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. That's the game. Maritime powers blockade. The response of continental powers is commerce raiding. Then the maritime response to that is going to be convoying your merchant ships.

As the war begins in Europe, the United States is not in, but Roosevelt is coordinating with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone all around the Americas, 300 nautical miles. Then the Lend-Lease Act, also before US belligerency, has pieces of it which say the United States is going to take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland. Why do we care about those locations? They're really important if you're going to send convoys back and forth across the Atlantic both to attack and to defend. That's what we're up to.

Even so, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic. A lot of things are going down. How does that all work? Before the United States gets in, at the very beginning these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone. Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off of its shores and also off the shores of Africa. The Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast. There's also the Fall of France which is a mess because prior to the Fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once you get the Fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the British have to convoy 400 miles further west. They've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation. They haven't got enough ships to convoy properly.

Then the Germans are really creative. Admiral Dönitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, uses wolfpack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, attack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy. Also, the Germans have captured some of the British codes, so they have a sense of where the convoys are. They're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic. 850,000 tons of allied shipping is going down. This is Hitler's Happy Time when he's sinking an awful lot of stuff. Then there's a big Greenland gap. This is where there's a lack of air cover, and you'll see a lot of things are going down in this Greenland gap.

Meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at espionage and they've captured a lot of Enigma machines. Those are what the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. Well, the British capture some machines, some rotors, some code books in 1940 and 1941. By the summer of 1941 through February 1942, they can actually read the codes and decrypt them so that within 36 hours they can get the information out. This allows convoys to go, "Oh, wolfpack there. We're going to do evasive routing of the convoys somewhere else." That may have saved up to 2 million tons of Allied shipping.

Meanwhile, for the Germans, General Rommel is in North Africa. He's having troubles because he's supplied across the Mediterranean and the British and friends are sinking too many of his supplies. Admiral Dönitz is told to reroute some of the U-boats in the Atlantic to go help General Rommel up in North Africa. The United States isn't in the war, so all quiet on the eastern seaboard. It's looking like it might be okay for the British for a while, except Dönitz thinks something's up. They add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine. The British are then blind again for most of 1942 until they can capture a four-rotor Enigma machine, all the rotors plus the code books. It takes a while.

They're in a world of hurt. The United States enters the war, which you think would be good for Britain, except it produces Hitler's Second Happy Time. Why? Because Admiral King, like his Royal Navy predecessors in the previous war, doesn't think convoying is the manly thing for naval officers to be up to. He's not for convoying. Also, Americans don't turn off the lights. Therefore as merchant ships are going up the east coast of the United States, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes, making them much easier to sink. By the way, in those days, Louisiana and Texas oil, which is supplying the east coast where a lot of American industry is, is coming up by ships on the eastern seaboard, particularly by the Cape Hatteras shoals which are like 30 miles wide. They become a total kill zone.

Admiral King rethinks it after losing more than a million tons of tonnage in the first three months of 1942 and goes, "Oh gee whiz, maybe we should do convoys." The United States does an interlocking convoy system by May of 1942. But then Dönitz just starts hunting things a little further south in the Caribbean.

The Brits get their four-rotor Enigma machine and they're able to decode things again. But there's another problem. The British think that there's something up with their Admiralty codes in August of 1942, but they don't change them out until June of 1943. There was something wrong. The Germans were reading them. You can see this back and forth in the Battle of the Atlantic. But eventually the air cover gap is closed. This makes a tremendous difference.

There are new technologies that are introduced that ruin Admiral Dönitz's operation. The United States had radar. Germans never did. American radar improved, so you can see through the fog. The United States adds hedgehogs. What are they? Not the cute little critters. Rather, if you have a ship and you have hedgehogs, they deliver an elliptical spray of depth charges. Anybody who's anywhere underneath you is in a world of hurt.

In addition, the United States introduces two new classes of ships. One, auxiliary aircraft carriers, little ones. That means you're going to have air cover for the entire journey. When you get beyond land-based air, then these folks will take over. In addition, small destroyer escorts were introduced instead of the big ones. These little ships have all sorts of fun things on board: sonar, radar, depth charges, hedgehogs. They transform commerce raiding into a low-life expectancy profession so that in May of 1943 the Germans lose 41 U-boats. That's unsustainable. That's a massive percentage of what they have. In one of those encounters—I think it's about 25 U-boats going after a convoy of 37 ships—they sink nothing, lose three U-boats plus another one gets damaged. On one of these U-boats is Admiral Dönitz's 19-year-old son Peter, who dies in all of this.

Dönitz, as a result, redeploys the U-boats out of the North Atlantic because it's unsustainable for Germany, south of the Azores. Yet there are problems going on with the Arctic convoy that takes a quarter of the Lend-Lease aid to Stalin, and it gets called off for much of 1942 and much of 1943. I'll get into it, but that problem gets solved and then you can see where all the kills are. The Germans are losing U-boats closer and closer to home shores.

The Battle of the Atlantic is won by the Allies in part by reducing merchantman losses through evasive convoys, and also increasing U-boat losses through all these different technologies and reading their mail, which helps to find them. But one could argue even more important was the civilian side of it: the United States' ability to just overwhelm Germany with the construction of US naval and merchantmen.

Here are the stats. Look what happens with naval strength. In 1943, US Navy hulls and personnel are tripling . That's quite a lot. Then naval hulls are going to double in the next year. That's a lot of ships and a lot of people in the navy.

Here are some more fun statistics. If you look at 1941 and go over, that’s a bumper year for U-boat construction. Then going into 1942. Really ugly if you’re a merchantman crewmember, because it's double the number of tonnage of merchant ships that are being sunk. But keep moving over. Look at Merchant hull construction, up by four times, and next year it’s going to double. Now let's look over 1943. Look at how many U-boats are being sunk. It goes way up with all those new technologies that I just told you about. Even though the Germans build a lot more U-boats, the kill rate is so high that there’s hardly any net gain.

Here’s more fun ways of looking at it. As soon as the United States gets in the war, new ship rates go up, up and away. But the losses are really high through mid-1943, but then it's in mid-1943 that you can see the big divergence between construction and what’s being destroyed. The Germans just can’t keep up with this. There’s just way too much stuff out there for them to sink.

Admiral Dönitz did get one thing right. His boss, Admiral Raeder, who was the head of the Navy, had said that pocket battleships were the way to do commerce raiding. Dönitz proved him wrong. U-boats were the way to go. Hitler agreed. He cashiered Raeder, made Dönitz the head of the Navy, and then Hitler went one step further. He scrapped his surface fleet, because it was useless to him in this war. You cannot deploy it in this kind of high-stakes war. It’s something countries like China, surrounded by narrow seas, ought to think about.

If you look at why the Battle of the Atlantic turned out the way it did, it’s that Germany and Britain had very different geographies. Arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy before the war. It should have bought a lot of U-boats and minimized the surface boats they were buying. Britain could do things Germany just couldn’t. That’s just part of the geography.

The effects of the blockade were really significant. You're really straining the German economy. But the German commerce raiding was also very effective. The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports and resources, but about half of its food supply. The Germans tried and came close. Then you go, well, the counter-commerce raiding strategy did work, but it was touch and go, back and forth, and it required a lot of things that had to be coordinated. You needed the intelligence. It really helps reading other people's mail. You needed a whole set of new ship classes. You need to be able to construct adequate quantities of naval hulls and merchant hulls. You need to coordinate with allies. You got to get food and other things to Britain. There are a lot of things going on here. You need air cover and the planes that are capable of doing it. There are a lot of things going on. Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different.

00:30:10 – Peripheral theaters leading up to Normandy

Sarah Paine 00:30:10

So that's it on the commerce raiding. Once you command the Atlantic—which means that a sustainable amount of traffic is going to get through from the Allied powers—then you can start thinking about peripheral theaters. What's a peripheral theater? The main theater is Russia in this war, not what you think. Why? Because between two-thirds and three-quarters of German ground forces were always fighting Russia. That means these other theaters, which are peripheral to the main theater, take up between one-quarter to one-third of German forces. That makes them peripheral. It doesn't make them unimportant, but they're not the main theater. By the way, who would want to fight in the main theater if there are alternatives? People die in droves in the main theater.

This man, Sir Julian Corbett, a very fine naval theorist of Britain, was heartbroken in World War I that Britain ignored his naval strategy, which was to not do the continental commitment and run the war through these peripheral operations. It wrecked his health. But according to Corbett, here are the prerequisites for a theater that makes a really good one for a peripheral operation.

One, it has to be overseas so the enemy can't invade you or wreck your productive base. Secondly, you need local sea control to get in there. But that local sea access has got to be better than the land access, because you want to have it easier for Britain to get in and out than it is for the enemy. Because then attrition rates will favor Britain. Britain also should deploy a disposal force. What's that? It means those forces you have who are in excess of what's necessary for homeland defense. It's not a disposable force. It's rather a force sized so if everything goes south, you won't ruin the homeland. You can afford to risk it on potentially very risky, but potentially war-changing operations.

In addition, they have joint operations. Joint means cooperation of land and sea in this era. You're going to come in by sea, you're going to supply by sea, but you'll be fighting on land. You better coordinate all that. It's got to be combined operations. What does that mean? Coordinating with allies. You need friendly locals who are going to help you do all of this. Then you need to command your own forces. Why? Because you want to determine how they come in, how they go out. If it all goes badly, you want to be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk. As much as the continental power might want to play this game, they cannot because they don't have the requisite sea access to pull it off.

The war winds up with Britain and the United States going through four phases—well, for Britain it’s all four and with us it’s some of the later ones—of four peripheral theaters. First, the North Sea. That's essential for British homeland defense. There are three keys to the North Sea: Scapa Flow, Strait of Dover, coast of Norway. Britain always controlled the Strait of Dover and Scapa Flow. Germany went after Norway to try and open things up that way.

Norway is not an ideal peripheral theater for Britain because the Germans had better land and sea access to that theater. They take Norway and then they set up sub bases at Bergen and Trondheim in addition to the ones they had at Kiel, Hamburg and the Heligoland Archipelago. These are the things that are ruining those Arctic convoys. That one does not go well for Britain. It winds up facing a totally hostile continental Europe shoreline. The Axis has it all.

In the Mediterranean, there are certain keys that Britain controlled. Gibraltar that’s access to the Atlantic. The Suez Canal that’s access to the Red Sea. Crete that’s access to the Black Sea. The British had a fallback position, a midway point at Malta if things went really badly. The Germans attack the fallback position because they're trying to bail out the Italians fighting in North Africa. They're trying to take Malta because whoever's got planes there can cause convoys all kinds of problems, or they can protect their own things. Malta is blockaded by the Germans. It's not relieved until the end of 1942. That is not great for Britain. It's threatening its access to the empire.

The problem for Britain is Italian belligerency. Italians had been part of the Entente in World War I. Well, they're part of the Axis in World War II. Three of these keys—Malta, Crete and the Suez Canal—lie in the center of Italian ambitions because they want an empire where they're going to go down the Balkan coast, and then they're going to go deep into Libya and Ethiopia to unify their empire around the Red Sea. Mussolini kicks this thing off, except then he gets stuck in Greece.

The Germans have to come and bail him out. They chase the British out of Greece. The Britons are then on Crete, and then that falls to the Germans. The Britons are in a world of hurt. The Suez Canal is under threat. Think about it. You have the fall of Norway, fall of France, the blockade of Malta, the fall of Crete. It is really bad news.

However, when the United States gets into the war, the United States can help Britain retake some of these keys to the Mediterranean. This is what is going on in North Africa. Admiral Dönitz had saved it initially. But after the United States is in with more assets, 60% of the tankers supplying Dönitz's oil are getting sunk because Malta holds and Malta is supplied. These tankers are getting bombed out of existence.

Rommel loses in North Africa, not because he's the inferior general—he's a better general—he's just not supplied. This is the key. Once you take North Africa, that peripheral operation, it opens the opportunity to go into Sicily and then the rest of Italy. Once you get that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landing.

So there are four different peripheral operations. Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign. You're bringing the war home to Germans, you're wrecking their productive base. Also it's a major help to the Russians. Why? Because once the British start bombing Berlin, Hitler calls off air squadrons from the Eastern front. These anti-aircraft guns can be used against tanks or aircraft. He pulls those back and that means the Germans no longer own the skies of Russia and you're no longer going to be taking hundreds of thousands of POWs.

00:37:13 – The Eastern front

Sarah Paine 00:37:13

That's how the peripheral strategies worked out, but they're coordinated through allies figuring out how to make all of them work. Here are the stats on allies. Alliances are additive, right? You should ideally add up all the complementary capabilities of you and your friends and then share them, divvy them out in an optimal way to deal with things. Well, the Axis alliance was also additive in the sense that the Germans added to their GDP the GDPs of all the places they occupied. That pretty much accounted for GDP growth in Germany. Except, that whole way of doing things involves big occupation forces which are big overhead for these conquered places. You've also damaged them in the conquest. Whereas the Allies are all game to help each other.

Also when Germany took over continental Europe, it's taking the big petroleum deficit zone because Europe doesn't produce petroleum. The North Sea oil, those things hadn't been discovered in those days. Yes, Romania has oil. Yes, Hitler takes Romania. But Romanian pipelines ran to prewar customers. It's very difficult to find the manpower and the steel to reroute all of your pipelines in wartime. That's a whole other part of Hitler's problems.

As you're putting together these complementary capabilities, the Russians have a huge army. Most of the fighting takes place between Russia and Germany. The Russians wreck the German army. You know, millions of Russians and Germans are dying here. But if you look at Operation Barbarossa, which is Germany's initial invasion of the Soviet Union, they suffer a nearly 30% casualty rate. That's called catastrophic success. You have too many successes like that, it'll be catastrophic.

Here's the mathematics of the main front. Only two countries have really big armies, Germany and Russia. Once the Germans maximize their territorial conquest, they've reduced the Russian population—because they've conquered all these areas—to less than that of the United States. Nevertheless, the Russians mobilize twice the army that the United States does. If you look at the mathematics of munitions, the Russians on their lonesome produce more munitions than did Germany. Once the United States gets in the war, we produce, I think like $100 billion in munitions. In that period the Germans produced less than $40 billion. Bad news for Germany in all of these numbers.

The trick is getting the munitions to the men. In World War I that wasn't feasible, but now these railway lines have been completed and it's pouring in. The Lend-Lease aid, you look at it and wow. Britain's getting a lot, Russia quite a bit, but less. China, nothing. What's going on there? You can only get aid in if there are ports and railways. Japan blockaded China. Proof of concept, it can be done. The Japanese did it and you could not get stuff in.

What the United States was trying to do... The British thought we were insane. They're probably correct. We were flying things over the Himalayas called the Hump. Great, you're going to fly in aviation fuel to land? That's going to be the same aviation fuel that's going to get you back. However many other bombers that you can deal with in China, it's not workable.

Russia, even though it got a lot less than Britain because it's not getting ships, is getting equally valuable useful things. For instance, Russia produces a lot of planes, but it doesn't produce adequate high octane aviation fuel. The United States had loads of that. The United States produced all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of rolling stock locomotives. This is what Russia used to transport everything.

The United States prevented Russia from going into a famine in the winter of 1942-1943. We fed them with this Spam in a can. This is Hormel Foods' contribution to the war. Everyone had much Spam during the war, they never wanted to see it again. But a little can of pork goes a long way and it doesn't spoil in a can. A quarter of this Lend-Lease aid goes through Murmansk. A lot of it gets sunk up there and not reliable. Quarter of it goes through Persia and then half of it goes over the Trans-Siberian. You go, “Well, what's this Axis alliance about? Why aren't the Japanese sinking any of this?” Talk about a dysfunctional alliance.

This is to tell you what happened with those Arctic convoys. You can see in 1942, a tremendous number of them were sunk. These are fully-laden ships with scarce war materiel. We and the British called them off for most of 1942 and most of 1943. Stalin was beside himself. In 1943, he's sending out feelers to Hitler trying to make a separate peace. Luckily Hitler was not interested. Hitler wasn't wasting his time with targeting empty ships on the home voyage. He was only going after the laden ones.

What is all this Lend-Lease aid support? What does it add up to? Well, in Barbarossa you got 3+ million Russians going after 3 million Germans. That's a lot of people to supply and tie up. As you watch that go, the Axis is killing Russians or making them POWs by the millions, but it's suffering 15% losses of its forces. It's going to add up. When you get to August 1941, that's when the siege of Leningrad, St. Petersburg begins. By December, the Axis is within 25 miles of Moscow. It’s not looking good at all. But once the United States is in the war, you can start doing peripheral theaters like in North Africa. Then these casualties, while they aren't as significant as what's going on on the main front, it's cumulative.

Stalingrad, the largest battle of the war, is going on. You got North Africa. Then when you have Kursk, which is the largest set piece battle of the war, a big tank battle. This is when Sicily's happening and moving up the Italian peninsula. You can see the cumulative effects of these sequential operations and how they’re adding up, both the main theater and the peripheral theater.

When you get to Normandy, the Russians are tying up 228 Axis divisions. There are only 58 Axis divisions in Western Europe, Italy and everywhere. That's what makes Normandy possible, the Russians really holding onto things. When you start looking at the main front, peripheral operations in Italy and then Normandy, and then you have additional fronts in France and then the Balkans, this continental cancer goes into remission. The Germans just can't sustain it.

To summarize, before Britain had allies in this war, it was in a world of hurt. It was just losing one thing after another. But once you get the big continental buddy—don't dismiss the importance of a big continental buddy—that is in the area where the fighting is taking place, not separated by the seas, but there with a big army, that was essential. Then once the United States gets in with its big productive base, then you can really start doing things. Because if you can command the seas—that's what the Battle of the Atlantic is about—then you can connect the world and connect allies, theaters, resources.

Here are the operational effects of these peripheral operations. You start with one where you can. If you win there, it'll open up a menu of more promising locations. All the while, you're attriting your enemy's forces. Also, if you're doing it right, you're relieving pressure on the main front for Russia, which is doing the heavy lifting. The strategic effects—if you can do this successfully—are that you're going to control resources for yourself, deny them from people you don't like. This will help put time on your side.

You're strengthening your alliance system because you're essential to each other's survival as you coordinate things and you're dividing your enemy's attention among multiple theaters, overextending them. You start by trying to contain the problem, and as things go on, you try to roll it back, and then you go for regime change. You're producing cumulative effects from these sequential operations. That's how it works.

Churchill, the great wit, talked about the hassles of dealing with allies. These are high stakes discussions. They don't always go pleasantly. But his idea is that there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that's fighting without them, because you’ll be toast. You need these complementary capabilities, different locations, and coordinating it to gang up on your continental problem. Also, if you stick with it, you can help establish precedents, laws, institutions that'll hold the peace after the war. That's his take.

Sarah Paine 00:46:40

I've given you a big exposition on maritime solutions to continental problems. In a global war you go for blockade, and then counter their commerce raiding, peripheral operations, massive production, and then joint and combined operations.

00:48:04 – Russia’s & China’s geographic prisons

Sarah Paine 00:48:04

So that was then. How about now?

This is what NATO looks like. You can look at the United States with our western and eastern coasts that are unencumbered. You wouldn't be able to blockade those. The two narrow seas are the Sea of Labrador and the Caribbean, but it’s basically hard to imagine that the United States Navy wouldn't be able to deploy in wartime. The same thing is true on the big peninsula of Europe. Turkey may not be able to deploy, but Spain, France, and Norway, there are these unencumbered coastlines. They'll probably get their navies out.

Eurasia is a completely different story. This is where China and Russia live. No one's done this to them. This is just the way it is. It's all of these narrow seas that become kill zones in wartime. I've described it to you how it works. I get it there's the Arctic up there, but there's no economic activity or population. Being able to run things in the Arctic doesn't do you very much good. Nature naturally contains both Russia and China. It's just the way it is.

Let's start with Putin here, Vlad the Bad on his little Mongol pony, a continental mode of transport. If you live there, what can you get out of it? It's a long horse ride if you're going to do it that way. Whom can he blockade? Well, he's got one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which has been under repair since 2018. Long time to be in the shop. It required the largest dry dock that Russia has to repair it, and then it flipped the dry dock, which then gashed the hull. There's been all sorts of charges of embezzlement, various fires on board. It's not getting repaired anytime fast. It's just like an occupational hazard problem. That one's not doing him any good.

Putin has got two liquid playgrounds that he likes. One's the Black Sea. Before he got involved with Ukraine, in theory he could have blockaded Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia if he wanted to. That was why he's interested in the Kerch Strait, which would blockade the Sea of Azov, because he wanted to take Ukraine from east to west. That was part of the plan. He used to have, maybe still does, it’s unknown, one overseas base, Tartus in Syria. Talk about a garden spot. I guess if you want to go bomb civilians, that would be a location for you. But now that Bashar al-Assad has moved to Moscow, it's unclear how that works. In any case, it's a useless base because in wartime, no one gets through the Dardanelles. That place can be shut down with mines. The Ukrainians have shown that you don't even need a navy to stop a navy in narrow seas. It should be a real wake-up call to anyone on a narrow sea. Just by using drones and shore ordnance and planes and things that you can wreck navies. In fact, the Russian naval base used to be at Sevastopol in Crimea. Putin's had to move it to Novorossiysk. Great, he can't do too much there. Have fun with that one.

There are many fewer possibilities for him nowadays. His second favorite liquid playground is the Baltic. Kaliningrad is sovereign Russian territory. Back in the day, I guess if they wanted to blockade the Baltic states, they could try it. But after the latest iteration of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland have ditched neutrality. They're part of NATO. Baltic states are also NATO. The Baltic is really a NATO lake. There's not too much Putin can do there. His latest gig is cutting undersea cables. That's about where he's at. I mean just look at it. Trying to leave the Baltic, it doesn't happen in wartime. You're stuck in there.

It turns out that Putin and Russia are much more vulnerable to blockade than the other way around. It's very easy to close up the Baltic and Black Seas. You look out on what's going on and they're hemmed in. It's all way up north. Russia has two really big naval bases, one on the Bering Sea and one in the Barents Sea. But the problem is when they deploy out of those bases, they have to go by NATO territory. You can see why Greenland and Iceland are strategic, because for Russia to deploy, it's got to go in between those places. Then on the Bering Sea, the more promising one for Russia, it has to go by the United States. The problem is how do you supply the thing on the Bering Sea? It's just a long way from any industrial base.

Another part of Putin's sad story has to do with NATO. If you look at NATO, you can look at its accession in arcs. Initially in the Cold War, the early Cold War, it's all these smaller European nations and everybody's smaller than Russia. It's by far the biggest country on the planet. Why they need more territory remains a mystery. Initially it's the smaller places joining NATO to protect themselves. Then at the implosion of the Soviet Union, it's all its former satellites fleeing at the first possible moment and saying, "NATO, NATO, let me in." Then with Ukraine in 2022, part of the Ukraine war, Sweden and Finland, which long had preferred neutrality, said, "Whoa, no, no, we're going to join NATO." Now the Russians look at this and they go, "Well, this is NATO coming at us in arcs." They're ignoring their complicity in all of this. If you occupy places and brutalize them for generations, this is what you get.

Here is Putin's muse. I don't know if it's his muse, but it's a guy who expresses a lot of ideas like Putin's: Aleksander Dugin. Here's his view of how the world should be. It's not a universal rules-based order where we all trade with each other. Rather we're going to divide it up into these spheres of influence where each is a world unto itself. Dugin's worked it out for all of us.

Here are the places that Russia's actually taken lately. At the end of the Cold War, it took Transnistria from Moldova. In 2008, it took Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. Then 2014, it's taking Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk from Ukraine. Look how it really works. This is a continental view. You want to color it all in. That's what the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is. It's the way a continental power looks at territory.

The United States thinks that Putin is just worried about us and NATO. Actually, Putin's problem is China. NATO doesn't want Russian territory. Who would want it? It's full of Russians. Stay at home, please. Just don't leave. But China might want it.

Also, Putin has said that if you really feel deeply about a place, forget about boundary treaties, you should be able to take it. Well, Tsarist Russia took a lot of places from China that the Chinese might feel deeply about, that have precisely the resources that China needs. They have not only energy and all those sorts of things out in Siberia, but water. Lake Baikal holds 20% of the world's surface fresh water. China's been blowing through its water table in North China. That one, I think the topography works such that you could pipe it all in.

Putin is dumping his ordnance on Ukraine that never wanted to invade, while he's letting this problem metastasize. Speaking of the problem, here he is. What are Xi Jinping's possibilities? You like the little natty upgraded Mao suit? Here's his world, welcome to it. What he's got are 20 neighbors, 13 by land, seven by sea, many of which despise China for excellent reasons. Not all of them, but some have them. If you look at it, it's all of these narrow seas. If Xi Jinping wanted to blockade somebody I guess you could try Korea, because you got the Yellow Sea and then the Sea of Japan, except Japan sits out there. That's a complicating factor.

Better bets are in the South China Sea, because Vietnam, Brunei and Cambodia don't have alternate coastlines. If they want to reach the open oceans, they've got to transit the South China Sea. However, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, all have other coastlines that face the high seas.

Remember, I've just given you a whole discussion about the Battle of the Atlantic. When people have high seas access, it's really difficult to shut them down because China would have to go all the way around to be on the far side to shut everything down on the other side. Maybe they're just going to obliterate it, I don't know. Anyway, the South China Sea is such a legal mess. No one knows who owns what. In any kind of war, you're going to have all these neutrals who might suddenly join sides if they don't like what's happening. But you can get a sense of what the possibilities are there. It's very difficult.

Usually in a war, we've already done narrow seas, right? The North Sea, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, they shut down in wartime to commercial traffic. It simply can't make it through. Surface fleets have great difficulty. If the neighbors, as Ukraine has shown, just buy the right drones—and since the sea's a little bigger—buy some submarines, some planes, shore artillery, that might be enough to just close down China's merchant marine and also its navy.

If you want to go the other way of working, well, what about Xi Jinping doing a surprise visit on the west coast? There's a lot of open ocean. Hawaii would be the nearest big island and it's a long way away. Hawaii's dependent on imports for everything. It's not very useful. But for the United States going the other way, the islands get bigger and better the closer to China that you get.

I leave you with Alfred Thayer Mahan, captain and later admiral, by far the most famous person ever associated with the U.S. Naval War College where I spent my career. Here are his prerequisites for playing the maritime game. One, you need a moat. You've got to have insulation from attack if you want to play this game. You need a dense internal transportation grid to get the goods out in peacetime, reliable egress by sea to get the navy out in wartime, a dense coastal population that's going to be running all the trade, a commerce-driven economy. Then you need a government that's stable that is going to support funding a navy and supporting commerce.

Let's line up Russia and China with these prerequisites. Well, neither one's got a moat. They’ve got more neighbors than any other two countries on the planet. Definitely not that. Internal transportation grid, Russia's remains lamentable. China's is getting better. Neither one has reliable egress by sea with these narrow seas. Sure, Russia's got the Arctic, but there's nothing up there. There are polar bears. Great, go get bitten. As for dense coastal population, yes, China has a dense coastal population, but Russia doesn't way up north. Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China was more under Deng Xiaoping, but under Xi Jinping, he is privileging the crony sector over the private sector. Neither one has stable government institutions. The litmus test of that one is whether you have transparent, regular transfers of power, usually through elections. A dictator for life does not remotely qualify.

So sure, China and Russia remain continental problems, but I don't think they understand the maritime limitations of where they're at. Of course, peace would be the better thing. Keep compounding growth and war, as the Ukrainian war shows daily, what a waste of Russian assets. But sadly, the enemy gets a vote. That's what I had to say for you this evening. Thank you so much for coming and being such a wonderful audience. Thank you.

01:00:28 – Hitler’s blunders & America’s industrial might

Dwarkesh Patel 01:00:28

First question. The lecture is framed as explaining Britain's strategic wins in how they prosecuted World War II. But it seems like what seems to keep happening is that Germany and Hitler specifically keep making mistakes. In 1940 and 1941, Halifax was saying, "Look, we need to come to a peace with Germany. We've lost the Battle of France. We've had to evacuate Dunkirk." Then Hitler could have done a blockade of Britain and could have just kept prosecuting the war. Instead, he decides to open up a second front against the other biggest army in the entire world, against the Soviet Union.

When Japan does Pearl Harbor, again an unforced error, he makes another error on top of that by declaring war on America, which he didn't have to do. It made it much easier for America to lend support in the war against Germany. This seems much more about Hitler continually bungling than about Britain getting the strategic picture right.

Sarah Paine 01:01:38

It's both. I don't know that Germany ever blockaded Britain. It was more that he was planning to invade Britain if he could. He lost so many naval assets doing the Norway campaign, which he really needed to do, that he doesn't have the naval assets that he had at the beginning of the war. That's unlike World War I, where the Germans basically had their whole fleet at the end of the war, and then it got scuttled at the end of the war. This time, Germany did the smart thing, which is to use that fleet to get something. They get Norway, but then they don't have a fleet. Invading is difficult.

Then because he's in the big petroleum deficit zone, he's gotta get moving. I'm not clear that he had tons of choices, but he's gotta go for resources. The oceans have been shut off for him. The whole proposition of what he's up to is questionable. But it doesn't mean that it isn't a really bitter struggle and difficult. Even though you go, "Well, Germany's GNP, if you add it up compared to the totality of the Allies vs. Axis, the Allies have much more stuff…" You can go, "I think the Allies are gonna win this thing." But after how many millions of losses? I showed you the Battle of the Atlantic, it goes this way, it goes that way, it goes this way, it goes that way. A lot of people are dying throughout all this.

Yeah, the Germans made errors. The first one is, why even go to war? If you want to dominate Europe and you have a really great growth rate, which in World War I they did, they would have taken over Europe years ago by just growing. Don't do either world war. Just keep growing your economy and then you're going to have all these good business relations. The error is even going to war for these things.

But it doesn't mean these wars couldn't have gone the other way. You're right, you look at blunders. But you call it a blunder now because it didn't work out. At the time, you don't know. A lot of people get away with really risky things and then you say they're brilliant. The ones who don't get away with the risky things, you say they're idiots. But it's dicey.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:03:59

I want to go back to the question of, when we're trying to explain who wins a big war like this, how much should we be looking at the specific strategies used in different battles versus just the total tonnage of industrial output that America especially contributed? By 1942, what is the way in which, even if they had a much better strategy, Germany would have won?

Sarah Paine 01:04:20

Define win. What is "win"? If Germany's win means controlling the entire continent plus Britain, plus Russia, you come up with one answer. If Hitler had just done the Anschluss, Austria joins, and maybe done the Sudeten number, which is a large German population in Czechoslovakia, and quit, he'd be called Bismarck II, a genius. No losses and he gets to keep that bigger area. But that's not who he is. You need to define what "win" is for both the Germans and for the Allies to determine what's feasible and what's not feasible.

Germany can be invaded overland potentially everywhere, whereas Britain can't. Germany just cannot deploy a navy the way Britain can. It's just geography. Therefore, Germany should have bought a completely different navy. Skip the surface fleet, buy a lot more U-boats. Maybe they would have zapped the British before the United States got its act together in either world war. Do it fast. They didn't do it.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:05:28

I found your thesis that Britain fought this very effective maritime strategy really interesting, but let me just try out a different theory for you.

Sarah Paine 01:05:36

Counter argument. Here we go. Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:05:38

After the fall of France in June 1940, Germany has all these U-boats. They're actually themselves running a very effective maritime strategy. In the Atlantic, they're not in the narrow seas. They can actually go to the ocean and cut off British trade through the Atlantic. In October of 1940, they sink close to 400,000 to 500,000 tons of British shipping.

The Germans are running this very effective blockade of Britain. The reason it fails is just that the Americans eventually can produce many more ships than the Germans can even sink. Ultimately it wasn't a matter of who ran the better maritime strategy. It was who could keep up the industrial output to sustain this strategy. It comes back to industry and not strategy, even for these maritime operations.

Sarah Paine 01:06:34

A, they're not blockading Britain. Britain's getting all its stuff out, but then they get sunk somewhere else. Blockade is when you're actually keeping things in. Germany has exactly zero merchant marine going anywhere. The stuff that you're talking about being sunk, they're naval ships but a lot of it is merchant marine because the British are getting things out. Tremendous amounts of it are getting out. That's just a difference.

You're correct about the importance of productive bases. Britain's problem in World War II is different from the Napoleonic Wars. When you change to oil for what's powering your ships and things, Britain doesn't have that at home. Whereas coal, it does. It has some A-list coal. When you're doing age of sail and coal, the British are okay. But then when you're changing energy sources, they're definitely not okay. There are other factors that are going on with them. But you're right about the productive base.

There's another game to play which I think is worth playing. It's the game of takeaway. You're telling me that there's this factor which is economic size. It's decisive and this will determine the outcome of wars. You're absolutely right that it’s important. Air power enthusiasts will say, "No, no, no, that's nonsense. It's all about controlling the skies." That when you control the air and you get air cover for your convoys, that's what does it.

Let's talk about why the Battle of the Atlantic turns out the way it is. If I took away cryptography, would it have turned out the same way? Negative. If I take away not just the sheer amount of technology, but certain key pieces like radar and those things, what happens? Does it change? Yes, it does. What happens if the United States just doesn't like alliances and you don't coordinate things particularly well? Does it change things? Yes, it does.

You can go through a list of this. Different people are designing different types of ships. You are also determining that you're going to share things with Britain. Britain's providing a lot of free stuff. If you play remove any one of these things, that Battle of the Atlantic turns out differently. The story is, it's probably a package of many things. This whole game of takeaway, when you have people who will come up with a monocausal explanation for you and they'll go with one cause, they'll probably be right that their one cause is really important. But then they are just ignoring all these other things. That's the more important thing in strategy. Your thing is truly important.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:09:24

The question then is what does "changing things" mean? Does it mean that the war could have gone on longer, or shorter? Yes, anything would have changed that. There's another question of would it have changed who won the war.

I'd claim that cryptography, radar, even oil… Even if Germany had a huge reserve of oil, maybe it would have lengthened the length at which Germany could have sustained itself. But if you change the fact that the Axis had one-fourth of the GDP of the Allies combined, I think switching that genuinely changes who wins the war, whereas these other things actually wouldn't change who won the war.

Sarah Paine 01:10:02

It depends whether the war is a war for limited or unlimited objectives. You can play that game with the Russo-Japanese War. All the data you talk about, Japan’s is a fraction of Russia’s but Russia gets trounced in the Russo-Japanese War. There's something that's going on. Japan has a very limited objective and Russia has other problems at home and is willing to bail. That's one thing.

But there's another thing. If Germany had simply never bought a surface fleet, if they'd been sensible… Surface fleets are great, Britain's got one, but it can always deploy that thing. Germany will never deploy its surface fleet. It'll get it sunk, which is what happened in the Norwegian campaign. From the German point of view, they got Norway out of it.

If they had simply bought U-boats instead, I don't know whether it would have… You'd have to do the math and I haven't done that. What their goal would need to be is to knock Britain out before the United States ever gets into the war. Definitely do not declare war on the United States. If you can keep the commerce raiding going for another six months, maybe Britain falls. Maybe that's the pivotal error. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about. It's simply that Hitler shouldn't have declared war, I don't know.

There are many factors that go into these things. A reason why you should listen to people who disagree with you is that they may see some of these other factors. We all have blind spots and we rely on other people to find them. But you have to be receptive to listening.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:11:40

When Germany and the Soviet Union split up Poland, there's this 2000-kilometer border from the Baltics to the Black Sea that they've signed themselves up for, sharing it with the other largest army that has ever been assembled. Did the Soviet Union think that in the long run that this was a sustainable proposition? Or did they just think that we could wait Hitler out? Or in the long run they’d be in a better position to wage war against him? Did people think that this was a sustainable arrangement?

Sarah Paine 01:12:10

I don't think Hitler was about sustaining any arrangement. He was about taking over Lebensraum in Slavic lands, Russia. But flip it the other way, which is what the Soviet Union is thinking: “It'll be great when the Germans go after the British. What's not to like about that one?” It's the pounce and absorb. They will weaken each other that will open opportunities for Russia. That would be the plan. Then he's looking at it and I don't know the details of what his timeline is, whether he thinks it's just a delaying act. I have not gone into the archives to read what Stalin was up to in great detail, but I think it's basically that one. He’s thinking that the British and the Germans could go at it.

Also the Russians had tried to work out some deal with the British prior to all of this. With the British, the communists had been trying to destabilize them ever since the Bolshevik revolution, and they didn't get just how lethal the fascists were in Germany. They didn’t get that they weren't just run of the mill authoritarians, they had this whole genocide component that went with them.

The British are thinking the real threat is the communists in Russia. They're right, long term they are the real threat. But in the more medium term it's the Germans. It takes blitzkrieg for the British to go, uh oh. Then they're willing to team up with Russians. Russia's willing to team up with them. When German invasion transforms what had been primary enemies, he takes that role being primary enemies for both Britain and Russia. Then you're gonna glue another alliance.

That's the trick in our own day. You do not wanna do things that make the United States the primary enemy of those two, of Xi Jinping and Putin. Currently we're not. It's Taiwan or India or Vietnam. Whatever Xi Jinping's gonna steal currently, that's his primary problem. It's definitely Ukraine for Putin. You want to keep that all divided up to the extent that you're able to do that. A lot of things aren't feasible. These are high stakes things.

This is where just not thinking about your foreign policy… It takes a lot of experts and a lot of people to game out what is your best course of action. What is your least bad option? That's usually what foreign policy is. It's not what the great option is, there are none of those. It's what the least bad one is. It takes a lot of thought and gutting the State Department will not get you there. It's profoundly dangerous.

01:15:03 – Bismarck’s limited wars vs Hitler’s total war

Dwarkesh Patel 01:15:03

You described Hitler's strategy as pursuing a continental strategy and that was his undoing. But it seems like there's many other wars where a more reasonable person can pursue a continental strategy and do just fine. Bismarck does multiple continental wars—Franco-Prussian War, Austro-Prussian War—and achieves his objectives. Hitler is just freaking crazy. He continuously does things. He knows going to war with Poland in 1939 that France and Britain will join. He's like, "I will fight both of them for Poland for some reason."

Sarah Paine 01:15:36

Resources, big resources.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:15:38

Somehow that works. Somehow, France falls in a few weeks. Instead of stopping there, he decides, “Now I'm going to go to war with the whole of the Soviet Union.” Then in what way is it a continental strategy to declare war on America, which is an ocean away? It's not even an adjacent continental power. It seems like just him being crazy explains more than him pursuing a continental strategy.

Sarah Paine 01:15:59

Let's talk about Bismarck. This is the difference between limited and unlimited objectives. These concepts, which I've tried to transmit in these lectures, are useful and you apply them to other things. An unlimited objective means the state in question is not going to exist at the end of the war. If it's really unlimited, and Hitler does the most unlimited variant, he's going to kill all the people. With Slavs, he's going to literally butcher them all. That's one kind of war. A limited war means you want maybe a hunk of territory, something less. The opposing government's going to live.

Bismarck runs three wars. One is the Danish war, then there's the Austro-Prussian war, and then there's a Franco-Prussian war. In the Danish war, it's about a couple of provinces in the far south of Denmark that Bismarck covets because he wants to unify for the first time all these Germanic states. He trounces Denmark in that war. Does he go for regime change in Copenhagen? No way. He just says, "Cede this place that you shouldn't have had anyway because it's got a bunch of Germans in it."

This is another concept, value of the object. How much is victory worth to you versus the other guy? For Denmark, just making Bismarck go away for this little state, the value of the object's lower to them. They aren't thinking in terms of creating a greater Germany, which Bismarck is. You have two things going on. You're giving the Danes, given how much the Prussians trounced them, a generous peace. You're saying, "Just get rid of this Germanic part that you don't really care about." He gets away with that one.

Then in the war against Austria, he just slams them. He's got this railway system that allows them to deploy where the Austrians can't. There are all these little Germanic states watching all this going on and they're starting to confederate sort of with Prussia because they're scared of all of this. Instead of doing regime change in Vienna, it's just saying, "Hey, let's cede a few more of these things to Germany." It was a big empire where you have pieces, you own pieces, you lose pieces. You lose pieces, you own pieces. For the Austrians, the value of the object again is much lower, given how they were slammed in the war. It seems to be a generous peace.

Then when he gets into the Franco-Prussian War, all these little Germanic states are joining with Prussia and that's going to create a unified Germany. Then he takes a bite too far when he takes Alsace-Lorraine, which the French are totally upset about. They never give up on that one. But all of these objectives are limited objectives. He's not overthrowing the Danish government, the Austrian government, or the French government.

The value for Prussians of unifying the Germanic states is far greater than the places that are losing these itty bitty places. Also, they don't get the big picture. They don't see it until it's done. By doing all of this, Prussia has transformed itself from the weakest of the five great powers of Europe to second only to Britain. That's ex post facto. It's a real reason why you don't want royalty running stuff. You want people who get their jobs based on merit rather than who their dad was. The world that Bismarck's dealing with is kings who are just clueless what they're up to.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:19:33

Last year, I interviewed Daniel Yergin, who wrote this big history of oil. He has like 300 pages about World War II in his book and specifically claims that Barbarossa was motivated by Hitler's desire to get the oil fields.

Sarah Paine 01:19:49

Yes. Yeah, he needed it because he had this big petroleum deficit zone. When you say “stupid to invade Russia”, probably it’s that once you've done this number, you have to go into Russia because you've got to take those oil fields. Then you can go, "Buddy, don't go for Moscow. Forget those people. Just go straight for the oil fields. Take that only." That would be more of the blunder.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:20:13

Is there any world in which Hitler would have surrendered by 1943 when it was clear that the war was going to go the other way?

Sarah Paine 01:20:22

Dictators don't. They just double down. This is the beauty of elections. I get it. It's a mess with a multiparty system and with all the crazy politics that come and go with it. But elections are a moment to reassess when the party in power sufficiently screws things up, where people finally go, “Ooh, this is a mess.” The party in power isn't reassessing. The election is reassessing for them.

Human beings, we've all met many. Most human beings don't like to change their mind. It's a terrible mistake. That's why I like the argument/counterargument structure, to try to take some of the sting out of changing our minds. Doubling down on bad decisions is a mistake, but we human beings do it. If you have a dictator, you're guaranteed. Putin is not going to back down in Ukraine. He's going to be going after it from now until doomsday. Then if he wins there, he's going to then go after the Baltic States. It's not going to end.

The enemy gets a vote, and you may go, "These are idiot decisions." But they're very dangerous ones. You have to do things to counter them.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:21:35

In World War I, you do have a lot of powers which have at least some amount of franchise. In that war, it would have been much better to lose the war in 1914 or 1915 than to continue waging it until 1917. But even Britain doesn't back down. France doesn't back down.

Sarah Paine 01:21:52

The problem with that war…This is another thing that is really helpful to do. To the best of your abilities, write down primary adversary, secondary adversary, tertiary adversary. Take all the powers in World War I on both sides and do their primary enemy, secondary, third. You find out it is a mess. Nothing aligns. So that, if you try to get out of that war, somebody's not going to like it because that's their primary objective. There's a lot of bad overlaps in who's going to get whatever parts of the Balkans at the end of this war. You really have to sit down and look at it. If I were doing a lecture on that, I have a whole other set of slides that would show you this. They're fighting parallel wars.

It's really not a good idea to have royalty running the show. World War I is the war where militaries on all sides are running the show and civilians are taking the backseat, saying, "I don't really understand military operations. We're going to let you boys do it." Disaster. That war sets communism and fascism up, it puts them on steroids. You can argue we've been dealing with that mismanagement in one way or another ever since. For most of my life, I thought we had put fascism back in its box and we were down to dealing with communism.

Now it seems that this very authoritarian vision which seems to rhyme with fascism… You can get into a big argument, what precisely is fascism? You try to define it. But it seems like we've come full circle in the collective West. It's a toxic way of dealing with all this.

World War I is an absolutely mismanaged war. Then the people who live through that set up these institutions that have held the peace until the present day, when irresponsible leaders across the globe are not cautious enough. Here we are. There's a price to pay if you have a bunch of reckless drivers on the road trying to play chicken with each other. How this will all end, I don't know the answer.

That's my reason for doing lectures on strategy. I'm going to give you concepts, some data to think about. You're going to have to form your own opinions and your own conclusions. But try to make it evidence-based and think about things. I recommend reading things more deeply. Don't just take what any one person has to say. Come to your own terms. That's the reason for doing all this.

We're living in really portentous times where people may make decisions where there's no going back. If we blow our alliance system, we're going to be dealing with China alone. That won't go well. Particularly if we think we're going to corner them in some way, corner a great power like China and think that'll go well for us. It won't.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:24:56

The reason I brought up earlier the primacy of industrial output and population size in determining who wins a war is that at the end, you sort of made a comparison that Russia and China today are in a similar position as the Axis was preceding World War II, at least in terms of the disadvantages that they had.

Sarah Paine 01:25:14

No, maybe I wasn't clear. I was just saying that we saw how it all worked in World War II, of people blockading or not blockading or doing peripheral operations or not. If you occupy Russia's position or China's position, it's not about who's going to win or who's going to lose. Both of them are much more vulnerable to blockade, period.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:25:35

Then it depends on do you think that was more central than the fact that during World War II, the Allies just had three to five times the combined output of the Axis?

Today, if you looked at the manufacturing output of China versus the United States, the shipbuilding capacity of China versus the United States, even if you looked at the international trade of China… China has more international trade with the world than the United States does. You can ask, “Who is in a more similar position to the United States during World War II?” Is it China or America?

Sarah Paine 01:26:10

More concepts. I did limited and unlimited objectives and I did “value of the object”, how much winning is worth to you. Another one is, what is “win”? If you're talking about the United States invading China, that’s insane. Who would ever do that? If you're thinking of whatever conflict you're imagining, if you’re thinking about if “win” is China…Tell me what this war is, who's going for what, and what a win is going to look like, and then we can talk about what feasible is.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:26:41

The most likely thing would be a war over Taiwan. The value of the object is clearly higher to China there.

Sarah Paine 01:26:46

If you look at Taiwan, maybe China can take it. It may have to leave it as glowing embers. That lovely chip foundry that everyone cares about, I imagine would be the first casualty of that war. That will be blown and be gone. There's no way you'll capture that intact. Everybody else is going to be terrified of this. It's not blockade nowadays. It's rather sanctions, saying, “If you're not going to play nice, we're not going to trade with you. You're going to have a massive timeout from the global order.” China is very trade-reliant.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:27:29

It's precisely because it has such a dominant position in trade that it would be difficult to coordinate a coalition against them.

Sarah Paine 01:27:34

Oh, why?

Dwarkesh Patel 01:27:35

The entire world benefits more from trading with them than the United States. There's more volume of trade with China than the United States globally. Then it would be difficult to coordinate a coalition to say, "Look, you’ve got to stop trading with the person you're trading most with."

Sarah Paine 01:27:46

The story is about sanctions. They don't have to be leak proof. If you can knock off one or two percentage points of Chinese growth just because some people are sanctioning like war materiel, that would be a very likely thing. After Taiwan, maybe you're trading with China, but you're not doing certain categories of war materiel with them.

The cumulative effects of doing that to a country over generations is the difference between North and South Korea. It adds right up. You could do the math better than I can. If you knock off 2% growth per annum, I think the doubling time of an economy… I don't know, if you knock a couple of percentage points off, it goes from 25 years to 75 years. You will be able to do the math better than I can rapidly. But it's very consequential and China's neighbors will be scared to death of this.

Also, you're right that trade patterns don't go overnight. They go gradually over like a 10 year period in which China will find it's already happening, as supply chains are moving out of China. It’s slow.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:28:55

The larger thing I'm trying to get at is this. In the immediate term, it seems like the thing that mattered in World War II was the fact that the United States was outproducing all the Axis combined in planes and munitions and tanks. Who is in a comparable position today? You'd say it's China.

Over the long run, perhaps we can cobble together a coalition which over many generations reduces China's growth or ability to compete. But I'm not even confident that the coalition would center around the United States rather than around China.

Sarah Paine 01:29:33

Not today. No one's centering around us right now because we're not playing nicely with allies right now. Rather, I think you will find that there are many countries that are eager to follow the Chinese model for development. They have cheaper labor now, places like Vietnam. India has also been doing all sorts of things. My impression with India is that one of India's problems is that it needs better infrastructure. There are investments going on in that.

There are many other people in the world who are interested in making money. They've watched how China did it. You can emulate that. If China is foolish enough to do Taiwan, these will be the long term ramifications. It's a mistake. As annoying as other countries are, it's better to just argue with them at international institutions. China has a big presence at these international institutions and should be able to get others to go along with however it wants to change rules. Do it that way. If they're going to do it the Putin way, you can look at it, it's negative sum and they will get a timeout from the global order.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution introduced compounded economic growth, this continental solution is a mistake. It is much better to forget about invading territory, allow the free traffic of people, trade, goods, ideas, and then we'll all grow together.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:31:02

On the general framework of how continental powers should act and how maritime powers should act. I wonder if it's worth even designating the optimal strategy based on your geography. To the extent that you think positive sum trade is better than invading and doing bloody wars, that's true regardless of whether we have a maritime or continental situation.

Sarah Paine 01:31:22

Yeah, I've just discussed geography because it's something I think most people don't think about. Particularly what's hilarious about people who buy navies—I've sadly had to read these naval theory books—they never look at the geography. They occasionally do, but it's sort of, "I'm going to get a big navy." Well, it depends where you live.

I've just finished and edited a book about fleets and being. If you have a fleet, what does that foreclose for whoever's around you? What does it open for you? It's not a great read but I learn a lot from doing it. It becomes really clear.

You can see that map there. You see Italy. You have in World War I, with that particular position, the Austro-Hungarian Empire has quite a good little submarine fleet. Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, he was a war hero, a submarine captain. Just by having that submarine fleet in there, it forced Britain to convoy the whole Mediterranean. Doesn't mean Austria-Hungary wins the war, but a very simple investment prevents anyone from invading over its oceans, which is important. It also makes the British do very expensive convoy duty because Captain von Trapp is quite good at sinking naval ships of the British.

That's the difference. Your geographic position limits what you can do. But now we have a whole rules-based order, that if you join the party you have a massive alliance system. That's why I look at China and it doesn't have any allies. It has itself and it likes to have bilateral relations. But actually these international institutions, for those who actually are serious about them, it's a de facto alliance. NATO is most certainly an alliance.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:33:26

If you are the biggest trading partner with say 100 countries, do you have a lot of alliances? If not, then that seems more significant than just calling yourself an ally. You just have an incredibly strong vested interest in the other country. The reason America has a lot of alliances is because we have a lot of trade.

Sarah Paine 01:33:44

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah it's important. It's just that the Chinese also come with this little piece of baggage: “We're big, you're small, so we get to tell you what to do.”

Dwarkesh Patel 01:33:53

Is that true though? What is it that they actually tell?

Sarah Paine 01:33:56

Oh, they've literally said it over and over again. They'll tell their neighbors, like the Vietnamese, to just basically shut up and color because we're a big country and you're little. The Vietnamese don't like it.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:34:05

One thing I often hear in these discussions is that it's the United States, which actually has stronger preferences in, for example, how your political system works. It may be reasonable to have, but China is usually more willing to just trade with you if you're willing to trade with them.

Sarah Paine 01:34:18

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah we've been really intrusive in other people's domestic politics, without a doubt. That is the American busybody gene that's gotten us into a lot of trouble. No one's perfect in this world, far from it. We all make horrendous errors and then do things we shouldn't do.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:34:40

I think that's an excellent place to close. Sarah, thanks so much.

Sarah Paine 01:34:43

Thank you.